Detroit City Is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis

by Mark Binelli

  “I’m not sure why they didn’t go into the abandoned house next door,” Miss Murray said peevishly.

  Outside on the farm, seventeen-year-old Tiffini Baldwin mixed soil and compost in a wheelbarrow. She had wild, frizzy hair pulled back into a ponytail and wore white work gloves and a blue hoodie. Nearby, a pair of goats rammed each other atop a woodpile. Baldwin had a two-year-old daughter named Nicole. She’d gotten pregnant at fourteen and kept it a secret as long as she could.

  “I was just bawling in the nurse’s office,” she recalled. “I wasn’t thinking about the baby. I was thinking about me, and I was worried about my family, particularly my mom. ‘I can’t be pregnant. Tiffini? The honor roll student?’ I was in denial. I just wanted it to go away. By the time I told my mom, it was too late to get an abortion. I was going to put her up for adoption. I actually met the adoptive parents. But I couldn’t go through with it.”

  Baldwin said her mother worked in human resources and her father did maintenance work for McDonald’s. As she spoke, she added scoops of perlite to the soil, which she said helped it absorb water. When the wheelbarrow was filled with exactly eleven shovelfuls, she pushed it toward the apple orchard. We passed a girl in a pink hoodie weighing a goat on a scale. A turkey behind a fence spread its tail feathers like a peacock. Inside the red barn, someone had written on a dry-erase board, in slightly childish handwriting, “Please milk Emily halfway. It is painful for her if she does not get milked. If you have trouble massage her udders or hold warm cloth on her udders for a minute. Thank you. Your welcome.”

  “Excuse me, goat,” Baldwin said to a runty white goat named Snow White. Glancing at me, she said, “This must be really exciting, talking to a girl mixing compost.”

  After school, Baldwin planned to become a nurse, “in order to live comfortably,” she said. Baldwin also hoped to indulge more creative passions. “If it was up to me, I’d pursue writing, but I have a daughter,” she told me. The father wasn’t around much. “If he would just come over once a week, I’d be happy,” she said. I asked if he was also in high school and she shook her head. “When we met, he told me he was seventeen. But he was older than that.”

  As Baldwin struggled with the wheelbarrow, I offered to help, but she grinned and shook her head. “If Ms. Andrews catches you out here helping me—she’s superfeminist. So, hah, I’m good.”

  In a couple of months, Baldwin would be joining Andrews and some of the other students on a field trip to South Africa. She’d never even been to Canada before. Baldwin asked if I had kids. When I said no, she said, “I don’t mean to sound like one of those parents who say, ‘As soon as you have a child, everything will change.’ But as soon as you have a child…” She didn’t bother to finish the sentence. “I just knew I had to go to college. I didn’t grow up dirt poor. But I want Nicole to have a better life than me. All this stuff?” She rubbed her dirty gloved hands together, meaning the farm. “I don’t really care about this stuff. But you do learn to take pride in your work. Students built this whole farm. Pregnant girls did this.”

  Baldwin was pretty, with dimples and a slightly nasal voice. She wore thick brown-tinted sunglasses. “I don’t want to say all moms, but all teenage moms think about, ‘What would I be doing if I didn’t have a kid?’ You do miss life before. I get nostalgic. If you’re a pregnant teenager, no choice you make is a good choice. I’m happy with my decision now, but I wasn’t sure at first. Ms. Andrews’s thing is you’re not dependent on a man. Like, that’s what happens when you’re around ’em.” She sighed and then laughed. “Don’t get me wrong,” she went on. “I love America. Free this, free that. But it’s a two-faced country sometimes. It contradicts itself.”

  A chicken squawked in the distance. Then I heard a police siren. We walked past a row of rabbit hutches and a fenced pond where a fat white goose stood watching us on one leg, the other held up like a palsied limb, and honked softly. Principal Andrews had wandered outside and cast a cold eye on Snow White. Earlier, when I’d asked her about the farm, she’d frowned and said, “I don’t like animals.”

  Now, she said to Baldwin, with just the hint of a smile, “If that goat comes in this school, you fail.”

  * * *

  In 2012, when the threat of financial insolvency had made all of Detroit’s government a candidate for state takeover, the city held a series of contentious public meetings on the subject. The most inflammatory remarks came from Malik Shabazz, a local activist and founder of the New Marcus Garvey/ New Black Panther Nation5, who evoked 1967 when he stood up and said, “This is white supremacy, and we will fight you. Before you can take over our city, we will burn it down first.”

  I’d met Shabazz in his capacity as cofounder of the Detroit 300, the crime-fighting group that patrolled dangerous neighborhoods. Physically enormous, Shabazz had a personality to match, obviously relishing his own oratorical skills in a way that is common among actors, preachers, and politicians. Shabazz had been all three.

  One night, I stopped by the New Black Panthers headquarters to chat. The building stood on an unlit, deserted stretch of Fenkel Street on Detroit’s west side. Shabazz was wearing a grey hoodie and oval glasses, which he kept perched on his forehead, and he chain-smoked compulsively. The headquarters was a junky looking storefront, with an old-fashioned domed hair-dryer in the back of the room and folding chairs and VHS tapes (with hand-written labels like “400 Years of Lynching”) piled everywhere. Shabazz had two televisions running on mute, perched up so high they looked like closed-circuit monitors; he seemed to be copying a Malcolm X speech from one tape to another, though we didn’t discuss this. A sidewalk sandwich board, propped in a corner, offered:

  Audio and Video Tapes

  Books

  Oils

  CDs

  Crack Houses Shut

  Detroit has been the biggest majority-black city in the United States since the 1970s, and remains so today, even in its shrunken state. Shabazz gives voice, albeit in militant language, to quite common concerns regarding designs on Detroit by a hostile white power structure. “There’s a plot to take over Detroit,” Shabazz says. “White folks built up the suburbs in haste as the browning of the inner cities took place, and now they desire to take this city back. Detroit is Chocolate City, the Mecca, the Jerusalem, the Medina of problackness and black conscious thought, in many ways. Detroit gave birth to the African American middle class, the Nation of Islam, the Shrine of the Black Madonna. Brother Malcolm was here. So much has come out of Detroit.”

  The latter half of Shabazz’s claim is uncontroversial fact. Detroit has been known as a strong black city for years. By the nineteen-sixties, despite the rampant discrimination, all of the relatively high-paying manufacturing jobs in Detroit had resulted in a high proportion of black home owners. Shabazz himself is part of a long radical black tradition that came out of the city. Malcolm X grew up in Lansing, and after his release from prison, he worked as a minister at the Nation of Islam temple in Detroit.6 The Nation was started in Detroit by a door-to-door peddler and life-long hustler calling himself Wallace Fard;7 when Fard fled the state in 1932—after one of his followers, Robert Harris, stabbed another man to death at a home altar as part of a weird sacrificial ceremony, leading Detroit authorities to crack down on what became known as a dangerous Negro cult—he handed over the reins to an autoworker named Elijah Poole, who reformed his own hard-drinking ways and changed his name to Elijah Muhammad. Over thirty years later, on Easter Sunday 1967, the increasingly radical Reverend Albert Cleage Jr. changed the name of his Central Congregation Church to the Shrine of the Black Madonna, eventually adopting the Moniker Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman and preaching a revolutionary black liberation theology, famously promising to “dehonkify” Jesus. Shabazz, after falling into a life of drug use and gangbanging as a teenager and young adult, turned his life around when someone gave him some Malcolm X tapes and convinced him to begin attending services at the Shrine.8 “I heard that little yellow brother speaking fire,” S
habazz says, referring to Cleage. “I was afraid for his life.”

  To this day, though, the black radical most emblematic of Detroit remains Coleman A. Young, the city’s first African American mayor. No Detroit political figure in the modern era casts a greater shadow than Young, who was elected in 1974—Cavanagh’s successor, Roman Gribbs, a law-and-order Democrat, having lasted only a single term—and remained in office for the next two decades, the longest mayoral reign in the city’s history. Even if he’d never gotten into politics, Young would have left future biographers with a story to tell. He grew up in Black Bottom, on Antietam Avenue, which runs a block south of Service Street. The opening line of Young’s 1994 autobiography, Hard Stuff, describes his earliest memory as being woken in the middle of the night by the bells of St. Joseph’s Church.9 His father, a hard drinker and dedicated gambler who had attended Alabama A&M on the GI Bill, eventually opening his own tailor shop, had been light-skinned enough to pass, which he did in order to take certain whites-only jobs. For this reason, Young writes, his father considered his skin color both blessing and curse—the latter because it often privied him to the unexpurgated feelings of white people. “It caused him,” notes Young with characteristic bluntness, “to hate them uncommonly.”

  Young himself experienced cruel and mundane prejudices as a boy: having his application to a Catholic high school ripped up in his face after the headmaster realized he was not Japanese but black; being turned away from the Boblo amusement park during an eighth-grade trip, when one of the guides, spotting kinky-looking hair beneath his hat, jerked it off and informed him that the park was for whites only. (“I honestly was not prepared for that,” Young writes of the latter incident. “And I was never the same person again.”) He worked as a shoeshine boy; read Du Bois; began working as a labor and civil rights activist after being fired from Ford (it was during this period that Young missed taking part in a major strike while he was off cavorting with a secretary, prompting an older union man to tell him, “Son, the human race is perpetually involved in two struggles—the class struggle and the ass struggle”10); flew during World War II with the Tuskegee Airmen, the elite, all-black B-25 squadron; returned to Detroit and began working at the post office, which was really just a way to begin organizing for the United Public Workers union (and become a thorn in the left side of the UAW’s Walter Reuther, to Young a conservative throwback11); found himself subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee, where his heroic, combative testimony became legend, in particular his verbal tussles with John Wood, “the motherfucker from Georgia who headed the committee” (Young’s words, in Hard Stuff), in whose district only 2 percent of blacks had ever been allowed to vote, and with the committee’s counsel, Frank Tavenner, a Virginian.12 Young wound up scoring a regional hit record when a local label released a spoken-word recording of his testimony.

  Then, after serving three terms in the state senate, he ran for mayor against John Nichols, the white police commissioner. In his campaign Young promised to disband of STRESS,13 a deeply unpopular police operation created during the Gribbs administration in which undercover officers served as lures for would-be muggers and ended up fatally shooting a staggering number of black Detroiters. (Young also promised to fire Nichols if elected.) The numbers undergirding his victory turned out to be a grim statistical illustration of the region’s forked path, with 91 percent of white Detroiters voting for Nichols and 92 percent of black Detroiters backing Young. At the time, the city was still just under 50 percent white, so Young won by only 14,000 (out of 450,000) votes.

  “On election day I became godamn mayor of Detroit,” he later wrote. But the truly frank analysis came a few lines later, when he acknowledged the reason for his win. “My fortune was the direct result of the city’s misfortune,” Young wrote, “of the same fear and loathing that had caused all of my problems and Detroit’s problems in the first place. I was taking over the administration of Detroit because the white people didn’t want the damn thing anymore.”

  In his acceptance speech, Young fell back on one of the tropes of the genre, warning criminals to leave town because a new sheriff had arrived. “To all dope pushers, to all rip-off artists, to all muggers … It’s time to leave Detroit,” he said. “Hit 8 Mile Road. I don’t give a damn if they’re black or white, or if they wear Superfly suits or blue uniforms with silver badges. Hit the road.” Whites, and the media, reacted to what seems now like a patently unremarkable statement as if Young were a tribal chieftan ordering his most savage warriors to invade a peaceful neighboring land. While this reading of Young’s speech strikes me, at least, as an astoundingly obtuse, almost certainly deliberate misinterpretation, its effect on the public perception of the mayor was immediate and devastating—and must be placed in the context of the day, when the fight between the city and the nascent suburban bloc felt nothing short of existential. In Detroit, Young and his new black majority had taken the reins for the first time and had giddy hopes for a renaissance, one in which they would finally share in the riches and create their own version of the American Dream, while just across 8 Mile an exponentially expanding population of whites saw themselves as displaced persons, refugees of a race and culture war forced to build dissident strongholds, where the true way forward would be demonstrated. For both sides, there seems to have been a zero-sum attitude toward resources, growth, and the overall development of the region. It was not unreasonable to think that the city, already increasingly irrelevant to the concerns of the suburbanites, who were building their own factories and office buildings and shopping malls and sporting arenas, might soon actually cease to exist in any recognizable form.

  And if you believed Young’s telling, the government did everything short of sending him exploding cigars to bring him down—only being a domestic enemy, the FBI was marshaled into service instead. Young became a target of federal investigations almost from the moment he took office, and though none of the charges ever stuck—on his death in 1997, he left an estate of $500,000, not exactly Boss Tweed money—several of Young’s highest-profile appointees violated the public trust over the years, most prominently his longtime police chief and close friend William Hart, who was convicted, during Young’s final term, of embezzling $1.3 million from an undercover-police fund. Hart was brought low by a deputy police chief named Kenneth Weiner, the son of a former Young accountant, who had started several businesses with the mayor, including one selling gold South African Krugerrands.

  Young may very well have been dirty. But it doesn’t require an outrageously conspiratorial bent to wonder if, only a few years after J. Edgar Hoover’s well-documented targeting of MLK and the Black Panthers, a prominent black politician with as avowedly radical a past as the mayor’s14 might not have been subjected to specially zealous scrutiny.

  What remains undeniable, of course, is Detroit’s continued decline over the Young years—from the Devil’s Night fires to the skyrocketing murder and unemployment rates to the crack cocaine epidemic—this, despite a handful of not-insignificant victories, including integration of the police department (and of city hall in general), a promotion of minority-owned business through increased government contracts, and a politically dexterous budgetary maneuver (involving voter-approved tax increases and state-level horse trading) that prevented the city from going bankrupt in the early eighties.

  Young also certainly understood the concept of playing to your base. People tend to look at “white flight” as a prima facie bad thing—and that’s true if you’re talking about the flow of capital out of the city or more high-minded ideals of cohabitation and a united, color-blind populace. But for blacks who’d long been denied the right to move to certain neighborhoods and take certain jobs, who had been brutalized by a police force that felt more like an occupying army, a reasonable response to white “flight” might also be “Good riddance!” In the same vein, could a mayor who won office with almost zero support from those fleeing white voters have been expected to lure them back to th
e city, where they would promptly attempt to vote him out of office? This is not to say making whites feel unwelcome in order to maintain a black majority was somehow Young’s endgame, an urban Democrat’s twist on the GOP’s Southern strategy. In fact, Young deliberately maintained a so-called 50/50 white/black government appointment policy, even as the changing demographics failed to reflect such a split—Young being a canny enough politician to understand he’d have to cut deals with a white regional business elite, not to mention the statewide government.

  Still, as Young’s cowriter noted in the introduction to Hard Stuff, the new demographics of the city “left the mayor in the uncommon position of simultaneously representing both a city and a race.” Maynard Jackson was elected the first black mayor of Atlanta the same year as Young, and his more easygoing, accommodationist approach—and Atlanta’s widely different fortune—makes for a tempting projection of an alternate possible destiny had Young not been so ornery. But Jackson’s electorate included a prospering African American middle class, fostered by the city’s growing economy and several historic black universities. Detroit, meanwhile, had a yawning underclass, poorly educated and mired in poverty. And so Young faced the same negative feedback loop any mayor, black or white, raging or conciliatory, would have likely faced: a steady loss of jobs and residents that had started long before he took office, leaving behind the poorest and least employable, which meant an ever-dwindling tax base, which meant increasingly diminished city services (including the sort of policing made especially necessary by such concentrations of poverty), which meant the city became ever more unlivable, thereby driving away more residents and businesses, thereby further eroding the tax base.